Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Not so Slick

I think it’s true that if you
attend a large gathering, your experience of it is not likely to match the
experience of just about any other attendee, unless the two of you stay side by
side the whole time.That said, this
year’s Gaylaxicon (a science fiction convention aimed at the LGBTQ community)
seemed to me to be quieter and more mature than in previous years.Maybe it’s because I didn’t stay Saturday
night for the cabaret entertainment, which in other years tended toward the
raucous, even rude. Maybe it's because many of the attendees this year seemed older.

Over the banquet table I met
a man who took sixteen years to earn his PhD in Medieval Poetry, but is earning
too much money in IT to risk going for a tenured position at a university.But his love of the period shone through his
conversation, and I was pleased to find someone to talk to who shared my own
love of it. One thing
we talked about: Maybe it's time someone started an organization to
investigate the wicked reputation of Edward II, much like the one busily
clearing Richard III.I’ve got his email address,
I hope we can stay in touch.

There was an art auction and
I managed to acquire a lovely knitter’s pot with three holes in it.The knitter drops a ball of yarn in the pot,
feeding the end out through a hole.The
ball can’t roll away.Better, one can
keep another ball in the same pot and feed its end out another hole and knit
the two yarns together – I am currently working on knitting a scarf of black
wool with a thin thread of copper mixed into it – without them tangling.Or even three yarns.

I was on two panels at the
con, the first on creating LGBTQ characters in mystery fiction.A whole four people attended, but we had a
lively discussion on creative writing and the joys of mystery fiction.The second was on forming families and having
children when you’re gay.I had
suggested that one, because my series characters Godwin and Rafael are getting married and plan to
have a child, and I wanted to hear from gay people the complexities of doing
that.The panel was well attended, but
not a single male couple with a child was there, so what I got was advice and
second-hand stories.A lesbian woman who
has a son with her wife had some good stories, some funny, some not so much.Very, very helpful but . . .

New topic: A driver tried to pull a
slick maneuver on me September 30.She
hit me when she changed lanes on a street, and then drove off.I called 911 to report a hit and run and
waited for the police to come.And
waited, and waited.To my surprise, the
woman came back.We exchanged insurance
information and waited together for the police to come.Finally, over an hour since the accident,
when they still hadn’t come, we drove away.I called my insurance company – and hers – to file a report.The following Tuesday I got a call from her
insurance company wanting to know what time the accident happened.Well, I wasn’t sure.The agent wanted to know if I could find
out.So I called the police department
and someone there got into the 911 records and said the call was logged at 2:18
pm.And it seems that the woman who hit
me had renewed her insurance coverage on September 30 fifteen or twenty minutes
later than that.(Did you know they
record even the time of day you file for coverage?I didn’t.)She apparently ran from the scene because her insurance had lapsed and
came back after renewing it.If she
hadn’t run, I probably wouldn’t have called the police, and there’d be no
record of the difference in time.So she
outsmarted herself.She was a very nice
woman, young and attractive, well mannered, driving a brand new Toyota.And now she's in
all kinds of trouble.

Betty, leave it to you to get to the real consequence - or non-consequence - of the accident: No injuries. With the kind of year I'm having, it was a real stroke of luck (or my good angel working hard on my behalf) that kept us both from that.